


Mad Girl's Love Song

by tempestshakes



Series: visions of joanna [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Asshole Angels, Biblical References, Canon Compliant, F/M, For the most part, Gen, Heaven, POV Female Character, Road Narrative
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-30
Updated: 2017-10-24
Packaged: 2018-02-06 19:24:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 3,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1869525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tempestshakes/pseuds/tempestshakes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your name is Joanna Beth Harvelle. You are looking for your mother Ellen, your father Bill, and your best friend Ash. You’re dead, Jo, and you are not in Hell.</p><p>Thank the goddamn Lord.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Canon compliant to Season 7. Only alteration is Jo knows John Winchester was with her father when he was killed.

**I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;  
I lift my lids and all is born again. **

\- Sylvia Plath, “Mad Girl’s Love Song”

**•**

Her coffee tastes faintly of copper. Her fingers tremble while driving. She smells sweat, propane, and ashes in a field of bluebonnets. There is a pain in her abdomen every morning, raging and hot, but it goes away before she peels open her eyes. She begins a count on her Wagoneer ceiling of the passing days, but she always forgets the number the next sunrise, and all her pen marks disappear except the name she scribbled down: Joanna.  
  
_Your name is Joanna Beth Harvelle. You are looking for your mother Ellen, your father Bill, and your best friend Ash,_  she reminds herself in the shower, washing her unmarked body. Hesitantly, she tacks on,  _you’re dead, Jo, and you_ are not _in Hell._  
  
Thank the goddamn Lord.

**•**


	2. Chapter 2

**•**

She wakes up in a cornfield.  
  
Jo hears her name shouted joyously somewhere in the jungle of tall, flaking stalks. The air is humid and abuzz. Things are dizzy, sweet, and she feels a low heat in her belly—like arousal.  
  
“JO!” It is a teenage boy’s voice, not yet a man.  
  
Spinning around, she picks a direction and struggles through the field. “Yeah? Here!”  
  
A whooping laugh sends her reeling to her right and the ground seems to swell like her heart. The boy yells, “Come on, Joanna! Your mama will kill me if I lose you!”  
  
“You haven’t lost me, Tommy, I—“and she’s silenced with a wet, sloppy kiss that’s haphazardly stamped on her lips by a boy who she knows will be tall and blue-eyed without even taking a peek. Jo remembers this. She can recall the tang of sweat on his upper lip, the ant bites itching on the backs of her knees, how much her mother liked Tommy, how much Tommy liked her, and what happened next.  
  
It’s 2000, and Jo is fifteen. Thomas M. Faulkner is seventeen with a love for mathematics, George Straight, basketball, and  _Buffy the Vampire Slayer._ His grandmother believes their house is haunted, but that’s all inconsequential when he’s touching her like  _that_ , right  _there_ , and she’s feeling warm and dangerous. They find a spot large enough for them to fit onto the ground, his lanky frame folding against the plants, curling around her, and Jo’s squirming beneath him to find control. They’re both clumsy, but that doesn’t seem to register to either teen as they fumble their way through clothing, and sweet spots, and murmured nothings.  
  
She stays with him for a while.

**•**


	3. Chapter 3

**•**

Jo walks the same dirt path home she took after her tryst with Tommy and knows her jean shorts and cotton shirt are smeared with dust. She’s swinging her boots by the laces and humming a Bob Dylan tune. The soil is dry and cracking; her bare feet skip over the diminutive canyons colored gold, her hair colored gold, the clouds colored gold in the dipping sun and all she can feel is bright pride slipping over her shoulders.  
  
She thinks she did pretty well for her first time—at least Tommy seemed to like it. It didn’t hurt as bad as the girls at school had whispered in the locker room before gym, down to their skivvies and jutting out their chests in womanly smugness, only the giggles that littered their conversation told of their real age and maturity. Those girls talked about how their boyfriends tried to be gentle. That sex was just the next step in their loving relationship, and just how romantic the whole thing was (something about red roses or promises rings or some shit like that).  
  
Tommy isn’t Jo’s boyfriend, not really, he is just a nice guy with a house that is haunted and cornflower blue irises that takes in what Jo knows isn’t all too pretty and  _likes it_. She thinks her hair is too wild, her body flat with no shapely swells or dips, her cheeks too puffy like a little girl’s, teeth too large for her mouth, and eyes too wide, too innocent. She has the pervading notion she looks like an annoying, scrappy kid on the outside and if someone peeled her chest wide open and stared at her insides they’d spot she is part freak, too.  
  
She’d been a freak since her daddy died out in California five years earlier, or maybe she’d been a freak since birth. Who knows?  
  
The familiar painful feelings sober Jo right up and she’s abruptly thrust right back in the melancholia that held her before. Those lines of thought had already been drawn once before, on Earth, in real time, and these present moments, these rambles were just a repeat of that day.  
  
The reality is Tommy was married last she heard and out of Nebraska. The path she walked on no longer existed as it washed away, along with a couple of farms, in a flash flood two summers later. Jo would sleep with a couple other boys, then a special one, and then a small handful of men whose names she’d forget once her vehicle hit 80 mph. She had self-respect, sure, but she also had needs—needed to combat loneliness mostly. Nothing like an hour spent pretending the skin to skin contact was more than just a passing game fueled by alcohol.  
  
Her path ends right at the back door of the Roadhouse. She’s able to hear the evening honky-tonk music leaking from the cracks in the wooden walls along with slivers of foggy light. Laughter rumbles, cutting through the sounds of glasses sloshing and crashing, and the unmistakable voice of her mother scolding some wild hunter like a white-hot brand.  
  
Tears prick at the corners of Jo’s eyes; she’s seen her mom before in Heaven (but not her father, yet) and it was heart-ripping to find out she was just a holographic memory of a time before and not the real thing. However nice it is to see Ellen flicking the same old tongue-lashings to the good boys back home, Jo knows that it isn’t  _real._  She presses the heels of her palm against her eyelids until she spots fireworks. All she wants, goddamn it, is for something  _real_ —  
  
And then she’s pressed on the ground with the wind knocked out her.  
  
“Oh, Jo-Jo, he got you good!” crows a familiar drunken voice.  
  
Another one chimes in, younger and more sober than the first, but just as boisterous, “Come on, kid! Get yourself back up! I got money riding on you, Jo, so kick your daddy’s ass!”  
  
Her vision comes back with her breath. The first thing she notices is she’s wearing fire hydrant red overall cutoffs and the Selena concert t-shirt underneath her dad bought her in Texas, and she’s wondering what memory this will be.  
  
Then Jo sees  _him_.  
  
The air is fresh instead of humid, but he’s outlined by the sun that is still setting as it was just a few seconds before. It lights up his blond hair, setting it off like a halo against the clouds, and by god she’d forgotten how tall he was, as tall as the Winchesters, and his eyes are deep and mischievous like her own, but a faded blue color instead of brown.

Her breath is gone all over again.    
  
“Roy. Walter. You both should shut up. Jo can handle her own, right Jo?” and a large brown hand slips out the sunlight and into the shadows near her chest. She grips it tightly with one of her own pale hands and lifts off the floor.  
  
Still in wonder, she replies quietly, “Right, Daddy-o.”  
  
“It was just where you put that front foot that gave me the upper hand,” Bill instructs.  
  
“I know,” she murmurs.  
  
“Twenty bucks, kid!”  
  
“Shuddup, Walter!” Jo and Bill holler in a chorus. It sets them both off giggling because her daddy’s the type of man who isn’t afraid to giggle even if he does look like a lanky, handsome 60s film star who belongs more in westerns and cop dramas than back road Nebraska playing with ghouls and vamps.  
  
The two get back into position. In the shade, Roy and Walt sit on the dirt with one eye on the pair and the other eye on their game of marbles, and when Bill starts moving towards her she feels herself collapsing into a familiar joy.  
  
Almost starts crying again, too, oh god.  
  
When this day happened back on Earth, Jo couldn’t have been more than eight, but here she is with her daddy already learning how to fight, and these sparring matches would go on until the back porch light flickered on with a sickly mosquito hiss and even after that, until her mother called the two in with lips pulled up into a smile.  
  
Then Bill would hop up right next to Ellen and pin her against the door frame grinning like a mad fool while his hands lethargically slid to her hips. Her mother wouldn’t even put a fight, wouldn’t even pretend not to feel Bill’s magic working, and her small smile would turn supernova. A loud cackle never failed rip through her body unbridled and organic, and her daddy, in turn, would take a deep breath (as if trying to keep all his energetic atoms together instead of exploding all over) before leaning down to kiss Ellen glowing.  
  
They had a love story. The true story of how William and Ellen Harvelle loved one another like a cowboy loves his land, like the stars love the night. The true story of two young folks who found each other in the small towns of lost, blue America and brawled evil sons of bitches together before setting up shop in a rundown bar to raise a baby girl with hair the color of daffodils.  
  
Jo knew of their story and how it was abruptly ended by a man named John Winchester.  
  
But she doesn’t think too hard about all that while she’s sparring with Bill, kicking up dust, and whooping to the bone-colored moon.

**•**


	4. Chapter 4

**•**

It’s been—by her count—four days since she saw her daddy, Roy, or Walt.  
  
One moment she’s following them inside the Roadhouse and the next moment she was back on a desolate highway with her car sitting idle. She allowed herself to weep for just five minutes before sitting straight and moving on. Maybe she doesn’t understand how Heaven works: why she can’t control the flow of flashbacks, where all the other dead souls are, or if she is ever going to be able to escape what felt like a gaping wormhole of yesterdays into a new tomorrow, but she sure as hell can give a single finger salute and keep strong.  
  
_Your name is Joanna Beth Harvelle. You are looking for your mother Ellen, your father Bill, and your—_  
  
The Roadhouse is sitting pretty once more in the frame of the windshield. Jo sighs heavy before riding right up to a front door that contains a lot fewer bullet holes than the one she saw last. She takes her time gliding out of her seat before slamming the car door shut with the clandestine fury that’s been boiling for days beneath the surface of her skin. It gets worse every day.  
  
With a hand resting on the screen door, Jo wonders if she should just drive away this time. Skip the bliss of reliving a happy time that never ceases to be followed by the raw rip of illusion that she always is sure to remind herself of.  
  
She takes one step back, ready to go off into the next horizon like a comet afraid of its own tail, when a flash of yellow sails past her right thigh and skids into the bar, the tangy scent of citrus trailing.  
  
Jo takes a peek into the bar and then there she is—little Joanna Beth—clambering onto a hunter’s lap while he sits on a bar stool nursing a glass.  
  
Her hands are scraping over his chin, fingers testing out the sensation of his beard, giggling as it tickles. Bobby Singer tugs at one of her pigtails and she shakes her head loose. Palming his eyelids, she asks, “Guess who!”  
  
“Who?” Bobby’s legs jiggle beneath her and she teeters for a moment, bottom lip tucked beneath her large front teeth in concentration, before righting herself, meanwhile, the real Jo finds a booth in a gloomy corner of the establishment and watches with bated breath, curious.  
  
“You gotta guess!”  
  
“Well, hmm…” he takes a long moment of deliberation and she grows impatient. Young Jo huffs and Bobby chuckles. “Jo Beth, is that you?”  
  
Young Jo howls with joy—literally howling—and slaps her hands against his cheeks.  
  
“I see you’re turning into a werewolf again, Joanna,” says another voice, tired, but warm. Her gaze turns to the second man, just arrived fresh from the road, blood still sticky on his cuffs and wiping onto the bar. Suddenly shy, Young Jo tucks her head into Bobby’s neck and smiles slow enough to make a cold man’s heartbeat warmth again for just a breath. “Remember me, Jo?”  
  
Young Jo mutters into Bobby’s collar, “Don’t shoot me full of silver. I’m just playing pretend.”  
  
“Just pretend, huh?”  
  
“Yep.”  
  
“Well then, ain’t you gonna give your favorite uncle a hug? Came all this way to see you.”  
  
“Aw, shuddup John, you idjit. I’m her favorite.”  
  
It takes a large amount of might to keep her emotions check, to keep the real Jo from smashing bottles and snapping pool sticks. She desires nothing more than to go over to the two men and hug and kiss them tight, tell them both that she loves them, and slap John Winchester across his finely shaped face for leaving her to deal with her daddy’s death like he didn’t give a damn if her mother survived from the shock, or she lived past day three of being a fatherless ten-year-old kid.  
  
Sure, Jo grew up and understood why he never came back, and ultimately forgave him just as Ellen had, but her world was turned once over when Bill never came back home from Devil’s Gate Reserv—  
  
Forcibly, she moves her scattering attention back to her younger doppelganger clutching the lapels of John’s leather coat, or Dean’s coat as later became. He’s telling her something in a light voice, but his glassy eyes are pained.  
  
“You’ve got hair like my Mary’s.”  
  
“Who is your Mary?”  
  
“She’s my wife.”  
  
Bobby ain’t even looking in their direction, but Jo can hear him muttering something, and it takes a moment to decipher his grumbles. Suddenly, the pieces fall together, clattering loudly in her mind and she comprehends what she hadn’t been aware of at the time—that already John is on his merry way to being drunk.  
  
“John—“  
  
“Bobby, how have you been doing?” interrupts John. Young Jo is spinning the rings on his fingers not paying much attention to the obvious tension that’s arisen between the two hunters.  
  
“Good. The boys?”  
  
“Fine.”  
  
“John, Elle’ll be back soon, and I’m sure she won’t appreciate you being half whiskey mush while handling her kid—“  
  
The Winchester is tipping her head back as Bobby speaks, and whispers (warm and musky breath she can recall, stinky, too), “Mary had brown eyes just like you, Jo.”  
  
“Like me?”  
  
Jo takes the stool by John and watches carefully. She sees how nice and affectionate John treats her, and how soft Bobby’s frown becomes once he sees that his friend isn’t treating her bad, or emotionally endangering himself, but mostly she gazes at the naivety her face reflects. This timeline version of Jo knows about vengeful spirits, werewolves, and that there are definitely no monsters beneath her bed, because her daddy checked, and that’s his job. But those are just the facts of life, no more threatening than bull sharks in Mississippi, or tornados tearing up the U.S. plains. There were ways to avoid or eliminate the danger. Her father and mom knew how to do that, along with all the ‘uncles’ who passed through the Roadhouse.  
  
The innocence found in the face of the Jo who sat on John’s lap was passing, but pure, and Jo finally understood that maybe she never lost that pearly shine that kept her unafraid of death but focused on helping others, focused on finding her father in every hunter and every job.  
  
Tentatively reaching out, Jo pushes a loose strand of hair out of her younger self’s face, and gradually slides a finger to flick away a piece of tangerine pulp from the apple of her cheek before running out of the only home she’s ever really known with the strangers she liked to call family.

**•**


	5. Chapter 5

**•**

The next step she takes past the screen door she stops feeling the Nebraska summer warmth. She knows she’s in a different recollection and curses the fact that she has to find her car all over again. It’s exasperating.  
  
Striding quickly down a sloppily decorated hallway, Jo doesn’t even pause to consider where she is.  
  
“Bye, Jo,” someone says to her left. It’s firm.  
  
She doesn’t turn her head, but she pauses and says her line, “Bye, Abby,” then tentatively—because it was the absolute truth and telling the absolute truth is difficult—“you were my best friend.”  
  
And she’s supposed to continue on her merry way out the doors of her dorm building at Nebraska State where she spent two years living in misery holed up in her room researching for the future hunts she dreamt about and going to frat parties where she practiced easy short cons on the drunk freshmen who loitered there looking for acceptance. Classes were dull. The people were nice for a semester until a team of assholes looking for Jo’s roommate walked in on her sharpening a couple of her knives in her rattiest Black Sabbath t-shirt, a pair of Ash’s boxers and nothing else. Needless to say, the guys were simultaneously turned on and spooked at the blond chick with long legs surrounded by sharp objects. In the end, their cocks won out, and they began needling her, asking her if she was freaky in bed too, and if so, could they maybe all have a spin.  
  
They were half-stoned, the sticky scent of weed slipping off their clothing and traveling straight into her nose along with the familiar scents of different liquor brands, and all the boys stood very big and towering over her bed. A hint of panic pinched the back of her spine, but Jo knew of worse things than four horny bastards hovering around her, so she talked to them sweet like she’d been talking to all the men at the bar since she was fifteen and “experienced”, a real Lolita with a shotgun and thirst for information. It all would have gone down fine except one idiot was actually bold enough to sling out his half hard dick and that set her temper off like fireworks on the Fourth. The boys hadn’t known who they were dealing with.  
  
One week later and maybe it was her imagination, but Jo was eyeballed and laughed at from all corner of the cafeteria, the quad, every classroom, and even the goddamn library.  
  
_Freak with the knife collection_ —that was the nice moniker. The ugly ones she kept quiet and calm about, quiet and pained. Always the freak.  
  
For the next year and a half, there were only a handful of people Jo could count on as friends. They were the other misfits: wandering, wondering, and attempting to find others they could bond with. There was one girl especially who didn’t mind Jo’s reputation or the rumors because those were the sort of things she didn’t trust. Her name was Abby Denson from South Dakota. She wore tortoiseshell frames, touted H. P. Lovecraft paperbacks and Hemingway novels, wore her hair down, and sometimes forgot to put on a bra. The girl was sweet and laid-back—less stress and street-smarts than anyone Jo had ever met in her life, and couldn’t help thinking that Abby wouldn’t last a day in the life of a hunter. But Abby was quick with words, intelligent, and open-minded which was all Jo could ask for in a friend and it the novelty of actually having a girlfriend to share her thoughts and secrets with was surprisingly great.  
  
Of course, it wasn’t meant to last, neither college nor a friendship with someone so inherently good that Jo couldn’t bring herself to confess the parts of her life that would destroy Abby’s innocence.  
  
“I  _am_  your best friend,” Abby had murmured.  
  
Jo hadn’t turned back that day, no way, but there was something this time around in this heavenly hallucination that caused Jo to swing lightly around to glance at Abby one last time and immediately she wishes hadn’t—she wishes she could erase the hurt, abandoned look on Abby’s kind face.

**•**


	6. Chapter 6

**•**

“You may be a genius, Ash, but sometimes you can be real idiot.”  
  
“Jo, I can’t be held responsible for all my actions after the Incident of 1998. You know that.”  
  
“Well excuse me for having a hard time believing that the fumes of the crashed computer left you with a high that still affects your ability to wear clothes.”  
  
“Hehe, fuck yeah  _hard_  time—“  
  
“Ash! Seriously?”  
  
“Sorry, but you bust into my room during a private viewing of Casa Erotica’s  _SweeTarts_  and expect me to be fully dressed?”  
  
“Oh, god, what the hell are they putting in her—“  
  
“Sweet Tarts candy, yum!”  
  
“Thus the name of the video.”  
  
Ash takes a swig of beer from his frosty can and readjusts his fraying silk bathrobe.  
  
“Listen up, Jo, I’m going to be frank with you. Little Ash will be making another appearance and—“  
  
“Can girls really do that? Look, she’s squirting. How do you know she’s not pissing herself?”  
  
“I think it might be time that you leave.”  
  
“Whoa! Talented woman!”  
  
“Joanna Beth. If Ellen catches you in here…and with me…aw, she’ll have my skinny ass…”  
  
“I wonder if I—“  
  
“Fuck, Jo, a gentleman has needs and I cannot sort them out with you in here, alright. There are some skin mags underneath the bed over there. Take them. Do your research or whatever, but I cannot spank the monkey with you watching and talking like we’re watching fucking Animal Planet.”  
  
Jo tears her eyes from the screen and gives him a winking nod.  
  
“Alright, alright. I’m leaving. Let me just… _Busty Asian Beauties?_  I’m more of a vintage  _Playboy_  girl myself—“  
  
“Hello sweet tarts, Little Ash is coming on out to play!”  
  
“Shit! Bye!”

**•**


	7. Chapter 7

**•**

“MOM!”  
  
Ellen turns in time to see the shovel flying straight towards her head. She swivels clear, the tool missing her head by centimeters. She glances back at her daughter with wide eyes.  
  
“Your welcome,” Jo cockily grins and tosses the Zippo into the freshly dug up grave where the bones of a murderous farmer lay salted and drenched in lighter fluid. A terrible screech breaks through the still of the Idaho night as the spirit’s bones are consumed by fire.  
  
Ellen stalks over with a grim half-smile but doesn’t say anything in response.  
  
It is the first time Jo saves her mother’s hide on a hunt, and it certainly isn’t the last. They help each other, a solid though sometimes tense team. But now that she’s dead, it becomes clear to Jo how much she has grown because nowadays she sure as hell wouldn’t be grinning like a green, inexperienced idiot about Ellen’s brush with death in a potato field. Death is real and whole and permanent for most ordinary folks—the  _extraordinary_  Winchesters aside.    
  
The Harvelle family just doesn’t have that kind of special to their souls.

**•**


End file.
